What is it with Republicans, sex, and science?

Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) falsely claimed on Thursday that it was nearly impossible for someone to contract AIDS through heterosexual contact.

“Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community,” he told Michelangelo Signorile, who hosts a radio program on SiriusXM OutQ. “It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.”

Do they have to take a Stupid Test to be admitted to the party? And score somewhere in the range of a flatworm?

Wow! I think many present day republicans have “shut that whole thing down.” That thing being their frontal lobes. But I also think differing to religious thought over scientific is the main reason these politicians can say these things with such gusto. It bothers me that Nature Magazine would publish an opinion piece titled “Sometimes science must give way to religion” by Daniel Sarewitz this week. I’m sorry Nature I totally disagree. What do you think PZ?

Literacy study: 1 in 7 U.S. adults are unable to read this story …
ww.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-01-08-adult-literacy_N.htm

8 Jan 2009 – Literacy study: 1 in 7 U.S. adults are unable to read this story … for the first time lets the public see literacy rates as far down as county levels.

The percentage of illiterates in the USA is ca. 10%, varying by source for the numbers and definition of “illiterate”.

It’s quite likely that Stacy Campfield can’t read very well or even at all. Or maybe he is just mentally lazy and doesn’t even try.

Where I used to live long ago, there is a rural area settled by Okies during the Dustbowl era. A lot of the adults are illiterate to the point where they endorse their paychecks with an “X”. They don’t send their kids to school so they are illiterate too. And they are very religious, fundies and Tea Partiers.

Wow. Count on a Republican to not even get their misinformation right.
-No, there is no proof that the first case of AIDS was due to sex with a monkey. That’s just the assumption of dumbfucks like Republicans who conveniently forget that AIDS isn’t just an STD: It’s a bloodborne pathogen.
-No, the gay flight attendant , Gaetan Dugas , was not the first AIDS case in the U.S.
-No, the United States’ “Patient Zero”, “pilot” or not, was NOT the first person with AIDS ever.

This dumbass took two AIDS myths and combined them together using the idiotic assumption that it was talking about the same person. Because that doubly false story makes gays seem ickier. Fucking Republicans.

Preview:
-He mentions the term “God Particle” with apparent ignorance that that was media’s doing and the scientists only used the nickname “The Goddamn Particle”.
-He plays the “you have to put trust faith in scientists” card.
-He argues that a metaphorical description of the Higgs Boson is similar to a description of something Hindu gods churned in order to a potion of immortality. Therefore…something?
-Religious temples left behind artifacts and relics illustrating what they believed. But the Large Hadron Collider’s machinery will not! Checkmate, New Atheists!

Of course, Campfield is half-remembering what he may have heard about Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On and the “Patient Zero” business, which made for a good story and provided a lot of material for the reviewers but had little basis in fact. Campfield has the “facts” of Shilts’s fiction so wrong it’s not worth straightening it out.

We should find some caves for Campfield and his ilk to live in since they dislike the modern world so much and they’re too stupid to even use Google to fact check.

… it was nearly impossible for someone to contract AIDS through heterosexual contact.

I have a community advisory position in HIV research. I am quite familiar with the reality — as distinct from conservative fantasies — about HIV.

Fact: Two thirds of all HIV/AIDS cases are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Fact: In Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, at least 15% of the adult population (aged 15 to 49) have HIV. In Swaziland, Lesotho and Botswana, the percentage is over 20%.

Fact: As of the end of 2010 (the latest year where official statistics are available), there were an estimated 34 million people on the planet with HIV/AIDS. That includes an estimated 2.7 million new infections (a rate of about 7397.26 new infections a day) but not the estimated 1.8 million AIDS-related deaths (a rate of about 4931.5 a day.)

Fact: Of the 34 million people with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2010, 3.4 million, or 10%, were children aged 14 or younger. Most of these were infants who got the virus from their mother: HIV does not cross the placental barrier but it can be passed transvaginally during birth, and the virus does express in breat milk.

Fact: Of the 30.6 million adults with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2010, just over 50% were women.

Fact: Since 2007, HIV/AIDS has been the leading cause of death among all women in their reproductive years.

Fact: In the United States, African American women — a demographic that makes up only about 6% of the nation’s adult population — represent 44% of all new HIV infections.

Fact: HIV in the United States, measured as cases per 100,000 population, has its highest concentration in the deep south where conservative bigotry has outlawed meaningful sex education and prohibited other avenues of education, outreach and treatment.

Fact: Of every American with HIV, 20% do not know they are infected.

The statistics are very grim, and ass-wipes like Campfield are bound and determined to make them far worse.

I think Republicans tend towards this opinion because most of them are having hypocritical gay sex on the side, and that’s how they tend to get it. Not well known for empathising with anyone beyond their charmed circle, the average conservative millionaires…

The county health department has a needle exchange program. It’s very quiet to keep the Tea Partiers from going crazy, but evidently the people who need to know, know.

During one of the perennial budget crises, they cut the program. Immediately, there was a cluster of new HIV cases…in IV drug users. This is expensive for the state, inasmuch as most of them end up getting lifetime AIDS drugs.

I think the most reasonable hypothesis I’ve heard is that likely it made the jump from some other primate to humans during a bushmeat butchering session.

I find it darkly revealing of the right-wing mindset that when you tell them that HIV orginated when a similar virus in monkeys jumped over to humans in Africa, their first thought isn’t “humans hunt monkeys for meat” but rather “OMG MONKEYSEKS!”

yeah you’re right, we Americans have no idea whats going on. We are all only allowed to believe in republican nonsense. We have never been to Africa and have never pushed for HIV/AIDS equality. Infact what is HIV/AIDS? We are so out of it, that we sent a robot to Mars.

And on your side of the Pacific, things such as HIV/AIDS research has been the main point in your society. Plus you have many and i mean many people from your side of the pacific in africa helping out.
And your side of the Pacific, has never ONCE had some jack-ass say the dumbest thing. Surely?

GAH! There’s so much wrong in the second paragraph alone that I’ll need to write a comment! I bet they invited him specifically to generate controversy; maybe they’re planning to publish a Gnu reply next week.

Fact: HIV in the United States, measured as cases per 100,000 population, has its highest concentration in the deep south where conservative bigotry has outlawed meaningful sex education and prohibited other avenues of education, outreach and treatment.

I find it darkly revealing of the right-wing mindset that when you tell them that HIV orginated when a similar virus in monkeys jumped over to humans in Africa, their first thought isn’t “humans hunt monkeys for meat” but rather “OMG MONKEYSEKS!”

And that that little bit of nonsense has been around since the early early mid 80’s and they haven’t updated their knowledge, at all.

marlonmark “And your side of the Pacific, has never ONCE had some jack-ass say the dumbest thing. Surely?”

Don’t get me started. Our one and only advantage is that our religious nutters and assorted blithering idiots don’t get as much traction as your much more numerous and popular examples of the genre manage to do. Though we’re pretty well up on the general anti-science, anti-logic, pro-incoherent nonsense scale.

Our latest census shows 22.3% of us definitely claiming no religion at all. Don’t know what the % is for the usual clowns who claim Jedi and FSM as their “other” religious affiliation.

These religious pseudo-experts that come to churches aren’t just creationists. There are also those who come around and give talks about fetal development, conception, STD’s, and the whole NWO nonsense.

Kent Hovind was only an outlier because he engaged in all of this nonsense at once.

Prudes really do spend more time thinking about kinky sex than actual kinksters. My first guess about how the virus moved into humans would be that happened due to human hunting/eating of monkeys, not that it happened because of inter-species sex.

None of this should be a surprise; the right wing has spent the last 20 or so years carefully manufacturing an alternative reality bubble in which people they hope to control will live, gifted with their own set of facts about the world.

I don’t think they counted on that group spawning congressional candidates from within its own ranks who would end up getting elected.

Expect to see a lot more ridiculous factoids from chain emails popping up in pubic discussion from elected officials; this is the world they live in.

My first guess about how the virus moved into humans would be that happened due to human hunting/eating of monkeys, not that it happened because of inter-species sex.

It didn’t move directly from monkeys to humans. It moved from monkeys to chimps, not through hot monkey sex but via hunting. There are two monkey species chimps love to hunt, and both of them contributed somehow to the chimp form of AIDS. From the chimps, it spread to humans through human hunting of chimps. So there ya go.

So that’s why the deja vu. I knew there couldn’t be two politicians dumb enough for this.

We have the Tea Party in the US. We have scores of politicians who are pandering to people this dumb. Is this really more dumb than Todd Akin and Paul Ryan believing that a woman cannot give birth to a rapist’s baby.

I think he may have been referring to work by Dr. Stuart Brody, a sexologist from Scotland who claims that it is very difficult to get AIDS from heterosexual intercourse (along with other controversial things, like that women who only have clitoral orgasms are emotionally immature). Anyway, this is from a paper of his:

“That persons of reproductive age with healthy genitals are not likely to acquire HIV from unprotected penile–vaginal intercourse27 is substantially supported by Greenhead and colleagues; they show that, in punch biopsies of vaginal and cervical tissue inundated with HIV for six to 24 hours, HIV was unable to penetrate or infect healthy vaginal or cervical tissue. Notably, intestinal tissue subjected to similar treatment was readily infected, an observation which is consistent with known ease of HIV transmission via anal intercourse. Of course, women who are manifestly unhealthy, such as those with syphilitic chancres compromising the integrity of the vagina, run a significant risk from vaginal intercourse.”

These religious pseudo-experts that come to churches aren’t just creationists. There are also those who come around and give talks about fetal development, conception, STD’s, and the whole NWO nonsense.

So did Isaac Asimov and Howard Jarvis ( A California Tea Partier anti-tax activist), and a few nuns, all of whom died of AIDS after blood transfusions.

And Ryan White, whom Stacy Campfield should be old enough to remember. His case was big news at the time. He was expelled from school and got death threats, all because he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion.

From this side of the Pacific, we’re sometimes amazed at American obliviousness to the rest of the world.

But if you’ve taken some reasonably active interest…

What, you mean like going out and looking for information? What are you, some kind of intellectual elitist? What’s on TV is all I need to know. My preacher will fill me in on anything that didn’t make Fox News.

That paper seems… dubious, to say the least. I’m not up-to-date on HIV epidemiology atm (damn thesis to write on a different chronic virus!) but there doesn’t seem to be much molecular evidence, at least to my taste (molecular virology ftw!). With those tests on tissue biopsy infection: one of the things to come out of HIV research was the realisation of how common microabrasions of vaginal tissue are in normal sex, potentially opening an infection route. The other thing I remember from a conference was a study of HIV diversity in the newly seroconverted (men and women), the lack of diversity was consistent with just one virus particle having made it through. So it really doesn’t take much…

is substantially supported by Greenhead and colleagues; they show that, in punch biopsies of vaginal and cervical tissue inundated with HIV for six to 24 hours, HIV was unable to penetrate or infect healthy vaginal or cervical tissue. Notably, intestinal tissue subjected to similar treatment was readily infected, an observation which is consistent with known ease of HIV transmission via anal intercourse.

This is irrelevant to how people actually have sex. Pseudoscience, how does it work anyway?

There is a similar virus called the Simian Immune-deficiency Virus (SIV) which is endemic to primates in central Africa. Almost every species has a variant of the virus adapted to that species, and as long as the virus remains in its host species, it is pretty benign. If the virus jumps species, however, it induces a disease identical to AIDS in humans.

HIV-1, which is the cause of the global pandemic, is closely related to the SIV variant common to chimpanzes. HIV-2, which is largely confined to western Africa and is less contagious and less virulent, is closely related to the SIV variant common to sooty mangabies. Other primary strains of HIV are known, but these have largely been restricted to only a tiny number of people living in the same village, or even to a single human being.

The most likely cause of infection is from bushmeat, exactly as the Rev. outlined: person butchers animal infected with SIV; the person cuts him/herself while butchering, opening a blood-to-blood vector of infection; the virus is an odd mutation capable of infecting a different primate species.

While not common, there is evidence (by the other primary species of HIV) that spreading cross-species is not rare, either. There seem to be a number of aggrevating factors with HIV-1, however, that have made it go pandemic.

First, HIV-1 appears to have mutated in a way that makes humans its preferred host. This has greatly increased its contagion potential: being better at replicating in the human body, higher concentrations of the virus occur in the body fluids that spread it, increasing the chance that it will spread to a new host. This also means that when a human is infected, there is a much greater chance that it will establish itself in a new host before the body can mount an effective defense.

Second, it appears that the colonial land rush of the mid 1800s to mid 1900s helped considerably in its spread. Previously (and with many other strains of HIV), infections were limited to tiny, isolated communities. The colonial powers preferred to consolidate the native populations and typically rounded up these communities and forced them into towns. With much greater concentrations of humans along with the breakdown of traditional cultures and taboos, spread through sexual contact was greatly increased.

The colonial powers worked to build towns and cities, operate mines and staff ports for the import and export of goods. These operations required a very large workforce. Many men left the countryside in pursuit of jobs, and the high concentration of men resulted in a high concentration of women who left the countryside in pursuit of jobs servicing them. The opportunities for spread through sexual contact was increased much further.

And, the early 20th century saw the colonial powers begin to implement widespread immunization against indigenous diseases like smallpox, cholera and typhoid. Sterilization procedures were rarely, if ever, followed: germ theory was still in it infancy and the primitive conditions in many towns meant that, very often, doctors didn’t even have clean water for washing down the syringes. Equipment got reused, which further increased the spread of the virus. In some areas, supplies were so limited that a small group of people would be inocculated, then after a month or two would have their blood drawn and injected into non-innoculated people, with the theory that immunity could be passed blood-to-blood.

Lastly, Africa was a major theater during both World Wars. This greatly disrupted social stability, leading a great many people to flee their homes and seek refuge in other countries. After WW II, as the colonial powers began to withdraw from the continent, revolutions and civil wars drove even more people to flee. It is significant to note that the countries were HIV was first documented were either the major colonial powers where many former colonists would have fled — the United Kingdom, France and Belgium — or countries that accepted large number of African refugees in the early and middle part of the 20th century — the United States and Brazil. This helped to spread the virus globally.

Forensic epidemiologists have found evidence that HIV was already widespread in central Africa by the late 1930s, and has been in the United States since at least the early 1950s. The most likely start of the HIV-1 pandemic is between 1880 and 1920.

…Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On and the “Patient Zero” business, which made for a good story and provided a lot of material for the reviewers but had little basis in fact. Campfield has the “facts” of Shilts’s fiction so wrong…

No worries, was criticising the paper! Spending all day writing about (other) viruses, it rings alarm bells to see a paper that lacks any figures (no westerns? no sequencing data? no barely-understandable epidemiology stats?). Wish I had time to debunk properly…

@Gregory in Seattle,

Great roundup on the origins. I’ve also seen some analyses that put the chimp SIV that became HIV1 only getting into the chimpanzee population about ~100 years before it made the jump to humans, and may also be harming chimps. They were still gathering data on the chimps tho, trying to test every premature chimp death in a forest reserve to see if SIV infection was causing greater mortality.

I realize that Markuze’s posts are largely cut’n’paste, but even so, the method of expression is oddly distinctive–so much so that it is immediately recognizable. This would seem to be a major problem for someone trying to sockpuppet.

@Markuze, are you aware that the way you write your posts makes them immediately identifiable as being by you?

If you changed it up a bit, wrote about different things, used some different styles…well, at the very least, you’d be more interesting to read.

There is a similar virus called the Simian Immune-deficiency Virus (SIV) which is endemic to primates in central Africa. Almost every species has a variant of the virus adapted to that species, and as long as the virus remains in its host species, it is pretty benign.

Food for thought:

If SIVs are endemic in almost all primates, and our closest relatives, the Chimpanzees, have their version, why didn’t we humans get one long ago in our evolutionary history? Why is HIV a “new” virus that jumped to us within recorded history? Did Sahelanthropus have an SIV, Orrorin? Ardipithecus? Australopithecus? Homo habilis? If they did, what happened to it?

I don’t understand why Rep. Steve King of Iowa isn’t getting throttled for his comment that he has “never heard” or “discussed” the circumstances of pregnancy from incest. Perhaps he should bone up a little bit more before he starts defending another bigot like Akin.

But, the thing that really galls about his comment is his notion that people who conscientiously object to abortion should not be forced to pay for them through their taxes. That’s a slippery slope. I conscientiously object to paying for warfare through my taxes, and I have the personal history to prove my objector status. I conscientiously object to funneling tons of tax dollars to agribusiness to destroy the climate and the health of millions of people. I conscientiously object to having bigots running my government.

“It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.”

Even if that were true, how do we know that guy was gay?
What is it with the Republican party? It’s like they’re trying to top one another for the most outlandish, insulting, offensive rhetoric of the day.

For those discussing the origins of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, is there a good book written for the layperson I could read on the subject?

I don’t know of such a book (doesn’t mean none exists!) but the origin of human HIV is fairly well understood. It probably jumped from the chimpanzee or monkey population in Africa to H. sap. in connection with slaughtering “bush meat”. Frozen anatomical specimens from people who died of unidentified wasting disease in west (iirc) Africa decades before the HIV epidemic emerged have proven to contain HIV. Once established it slowly percolated through the population until by chance it reached the gay population of North America, which during the 1970s was notably promiscuous. The rest is history.

Some believe that it only became pervasive in Africa after widespread vaccination for polio using vaccines prepared with monkey tissues. Maybe; maybe not. The jury is still out on that. However, given the way this hypothesis is presented by some of its advocates, it comes across as a conspiracy theory, which reduces its credibility. After all, HIV is very easily spread by sexual intercourse and by dirty hypodermic needles, both of which are common in human societies, esp. poor ones. All it took to get an epidemic started was one human carrying HIV.

If you find a book purporting to cover this topic, beware insane conspiracy theories.

Perhaps someone more in tune with current research on the origins of the HIV epidemic can give us more info.

Amphiox,
It may well be that HIV has always been around like you suggest. In the past (like, before 100 years ago), people rarely traveled far from home, which would limit the spread of some diseases. The fact that HIV infection requires fluid-fluid contact, and has a long incubation time, and can have any number of proximate causes of death, makes it an ideal candidate for a long-term lurker that is easily mistaken for something else.

This is just another win for these Creationist Republicans. Doesn’t matter if Stacey Campfield is totally wrong on all counts and will maybe even have to recant at some later date. Most people, the lazy and uneducated, will only remember the lie and will think it’s the truth. That’s how Republicans work: there religion is based on lies, their whole lives are based on lies, so shamefaced lying is just part of the agenda because you know the majority of people will never take the time to figure out what is the truth is.

Holding power is their only goal, so they say anything, no matter what the facts are. It totally works, which why they are successful.

OriginsBoth HIV-1 and HIV-2 are believed to have originated in non-human primates in West-central Africa and were transferred to humans (a process known as zoonosis) in the early 20th century.[82] HIV-1 appears to have originated in southern Cameroon through the evolution of SIV(cpz), a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that infects wild chimpanzees (HIV-1 descends from the SIVcpz endemic in the chimpanzee subspecies Pan troglodytes troglodytes).[83][84] The closest relative of HIV-2 is SIV(smm), a virus of the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys atys), an Old World monkey living in litoral West Africa (from southern Senegal to western Ivory Coast).[9] New World monkeys such as the owl monkey are resistant to HIV-1 infection, possibly because of a genomic fusion of two viral resistance genes.[85] HIV-1 is thought to have jumped the species barrier on at least three separate occasions, giving rise to the three groups of the virus, M, N, and O.[86]

There is evidence that humans who participate in bushmeat activities, either as hunters or as bushmeat vendors, commonly acquire SIV.[87] However, SIV is a weak virus, it is typically suppressed by the human immune system within weeks of infection. It is thought that several transmissions of the virus from individual to individual in quick succession are necessary to allow it enough time to mutate into HIV.[88] Furthermore, due to its relatively low person-to-person transmission rate, it can only spread throughout the population in the presence of one or more of high-risk transmission channels, which are thought to have been absent in Africa prior to the 20th century.

Specific proposed high-risk transmission channels, allowing the virus to adapt to humans and spread throughout the society, depend on the proposed timing of the animal-to-human crossing. Genetic studies of the virus suggest that the most recent common ancestor of the HIV-1 M group dates back to circa 1910.[89] Proponents of this dating link the HIV epidemic with the emergence of colonialism and growth of large colonial African cities, leading to social changes, including a higher degree of sexual promiscuity, the spread of prostitution, and the concomitant high frequency of genital ulcer diseases (such as syphilis) in nascent colonial cities.[90] While transmission rates of HIV during vaginal intercourse, are low under regular circumstances, they are increased many fold if one of the partners suffers from a sexually transmitted infection resulting in genital ulcers. Early 1900s colonial cities were notable due to their high prevalence of prostitution and genital ulcers, to the degree that, as of 1928, as many as 45% of female residents of eastern Kinshasa were thought to have been prostitutes, and, as of 1933, around 15% of all residents of the same city were infected by one of the forms of syphilis.[90]

An alternative view holds that unsafe medical practices in Africa during years following World War II, such as unsterile reuse of single use syringes during mass vaccination, antibiotic and anti-malaria treatment campaigns, were the initial vector that allowed the virus to adapt to humans and spread.[88][91][92]

The earliest well documented case of HIV in a human dates back to 1959 in the Congo.[93] The virus may have been present in the United States as early as 1966.[94]

HIV origins from wikipedia.

We may never know the exact details but we know enough to come up with theories that would work even if they aren’t the way it actually happened.

Viruses jumping from animals to humans aren’t uncommon. We just had the swine flu and right now, there is West Nile epidemic. Again. The scary one was SARS which almost got away and almost established itself in the human population.

If SIVs are endemic in almost all primates, and our closest relatives, the Chimpanzees, have their version, why didn’t we humans get one long ago in our evolutionary history? Why is HIV a “new” virus that jumped to us within recorded history? Did Sahelanthropus have an SIV, Orrorin? Ardipithecus? Australopithecus? Homo habilis? If they did, what happened to it?

(And why is HIV called HIV, and not SIV-(human variant)?)

It is almost certain that HIV has been affecting hominids in Africa for as long as it has been affecting other primates. However, hominids went through an evolutionary “bottleneck” about 70,000 years ago, with the total human population believed to have been reduced to perhaps as few as 15,000 people on the planet. Whether that population carried the virus when conditions changed, we probably will never know. It is interesting to note, however, that other than primates, viruses in the genus Lentivirus affect only bovines, equines, felines and caprids (sheep and goats)… all animals that were domesticated very early in human history and in regions in or close to Africa. Whether Homo neandertalensis or other hominids carried the the virus out of Africa, we probably will never know.

As for the naming, the first discoverer of the virus (a team in France led by Luc Montagnier) named it the lymphadenopathy associated virus (LAV); lymphadenopathy is a 50 cent word that means “infection of the lymph nodes.” The second discoverer (a team in the US led by Robert Gallo) named it the human t-cell lymphotrophic virus, sub-type III (HTLV-III); HTLV is a class of viruses that cause lymphoma and a few similar diseases. The name HIV was imposed by the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses to end the squabbling over who had discovered what. SIV was discovered later, as research into HIV found it to be the human version of a larger class of closely related viruses. The distinction has been useful in terms of epidemiology, and HIV was a part of the public dialog before the discovery of SIV, so the different names remain.

Where I used to live long ago, there is a rural area settled by Okies during the Dustbowl era. A lot of the adults are illiterate to the point where they endorse their paychecks with an “X”. They don’t send their kids to school so they are illiterate too. And they are very religious, fundies and Tea Partiers.

What’s the actual locale of that little puddle of illiteracy?

PS: Apologies for in effect repeating what had already been said, in my posting above, #103. One of these days I’ll learn to read comments top down instead of bottom up.

Gregory in Seattle – is there any posited relation between HIV and the Black Death? I know some people of northern European ancestry are resistant to HIV, and one preliminary hypothesis was that this came from an inherited resistance to the Black Death. Is that still the current thinking? And if so, is that because the infections are coincidentally similar, or is there a chance HIV is a mutated descendant of the Black Death (or a relative of the Black Death)?

I don’t even know if they still think the Black Death was bubonic plague or if they now think it was something else. PBS specials only teach me so much….

@Markuze, are you aware that the way you write your posts makes them immediately identifiable as being by you?

If you changed it up a bit, wrote about different things, used some different styles…well, at the very least, you’d be more interesting to read.

You do realize this is circular reasoning, right? We always recognize his posts, because he always posts in a way that’s clearly him. Therefore he has no undetected sockpuppets, because we can always tell when it’s clearly him.

For all we know, Rev BDC or Brownian are his sockpuppets. Or PZ, even. Nobody is safe.

I have come to the conclusion that Republicans restrict their sources of information to those that are as ill informed as they are. This precludes the troublesome experience of learning something that is reality-based.

The Republican carapace cracks if you subject it to facts.

Also, I don’t think Republicans know how to vet their sources. Mitt Romney has proven that he doesn’t know how to vet sources, and he hired staff who likewise lack this skill.

IANAV, but is it possible that the Black Death (i.e. specifically the 1347 outbreak) was simultaneously more than one disease that co-manifested and aggravated each other (like, one that lowered natural immunity and displayed symptoms a, b, and c, and another opportunistic thing that displayed symptoms d, e, and f, and you died of all six symptoms?)

As A.R. says, the matter seems to have been settled. As far as I recall, doubts had been expressed because of the speed of the Black Death’s spread, too fast for rats to be a plausible vector in some cases, but in its pneumonic form, plague can spread directly between people.

Gregory in Seattle – is there any posited relation between HIV and the Black Death? I know some people of northern European ancestry are resistant to HIV, and one preliminary hypothesis was that this came from an inherited resistance to the Black Death. Is that still the current thinking? And if so, is that because the infections are coincidentally similar, or is there a chance HIV is a mutated descendant of the Black Death (or a relative of the Black Death)?

I don’t even know if they still think the Black Death was bubonic plague or if they now think it was something else. PBS specials only teach me so much…

Absolutely zero chance: research has shown conclusively that the culprit for the Black Death was the baterium Yersinia pestis. Anyway, the symptoms of the Black Death — sudden onset of high fever, rapid and severe swelling of the lymph nodes and, within two or three days, necrosis resulting the characteristic rotting flesh and stench of the Plague — are completely unlike the gradual (over months and years) progression of a vague weakness that grows into a large variety of opportunistic infections.

The idea that AIDS came into the human population via sex with monkeys is just another example of a common thread of belief amonst many homophobes. They believe that every gay person is obsessed with sex, will have sex as often as possible, with anyone possible, and that they all practice the most “upsetting” sex practices possible, We’re all familiar with the attempts of many of them to equate pedophilia with gays, and I remember someone claim years ago that eating feces was a very common practice amongst gay men.. So it’s no surprise the idea that AIDS is all the fault of some gay man having sex with a monkey would be out there.

The connection between HIV and Black Death is that both the HIV virus and Y. pestis apparently exploit the same cell surface receptors to get inside certain immune cells (macrophages or T cells or both, I think). And it turns out that a specific receptor mutation confers resistance to both of them. When this mutation was discovered in the context of the modern AIDS epidemic, it was discovered that the mutation was more common in people of European descent, and the locus had experienced a selective sweep in Europe, at precisely the time of the Black Death pandemic.

How the antiabortion movement taught the Republican Party to hate science — article by Amanda Marcotte

Excerpt:

… Just as conservatives have been able to pay handsomely for people with impressive-sounding credentials to spread lies about everything from global warming to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so have they been able to build up their own little empire of medical doctors who will say any fool thing about women’s bodies and pass it off as science.

If anything, the anti-choice movement was instrumental in shaping the conservative approach to science. Anti-choicers were among the first to realize that if the experts and the evidence counter your beliefs, you can simply make up your own claims and put them in the mouths of well-credentialed people. …

This strategy among anti-choicers of simply telling lies about how sex and reproduction works has been built into the movement from the beginning and continues to be one of its primary strategies. Anti-choicers continue to insist, despite the evidence to the contrary, that abortion causes breast cancer and suicide, and politicians have gone as far as forcing doctors to tell these lies to patients seeking abortions. Just this week, the ACLU had to sue a California school district for promoting hoary Christian right myths like “kissing spreads HIV” and recommending “plenty of rest” instead of condoms to prevent STDs. The Bush administration showed much love for the “making crap up” school of anti-choice medical science, by appointing Eric Keroack as deputy assistant secretary for population affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, even though Keroack promoted the belief that women who have multiple sexual partners are physically incapable of feeling love for their husbands or children.. …

Paul@109, I fear my point was a bit subtle, as I was trying to draw Mr. Markuze out (unsuccessfully). You see, no one would care if Markuze had sock-puppets who didn’t have his rather unique style and content, because it is that exact style and content that makes him so annoying (and potentially dangerous).

If Markuze were to switch to a less, ah, memorable sock-puppet, that would be greatly desirable, even if we didn’t know who he was.

The connection between HIV and Black Death is that both the HIV virus and Y. pestis apparently exploit the same cell surface receptors to get inside certain immune cells (macrophages or T cells or both, I think). And it turns out that a specific receptor mutation confers resistance to both of them. When this mutation was discovered in the context of the modern AIDS epidemic, it was discovered that the mutation was more common in people of European descent, and the locus had experienced a selective sweep in Europe, at precisely the time of the Black Death pandemic.

Specifically, both the plague bacterium and the HIV retrovirus attack the cell by binding with a specific receptor site on the T-cell’s surface. The mutation that provides HIV resistance does so by eliminating that receptor, so that cell penetration can’t occur.

I did a medical elective in Harcourt St Children’s Hospital, Dublin, in the late 1980s and got to know a 14-year-old boy who lived virtually full-time in the hospital because he had contracted HIV due to his haemophilia. People with Haemophilia A need a steady supply of Factor VIII to stop themselves bleeding to death (it’s usually not exsanguination that kills them, it’s intracerebral haemorrhages), and the only way to get Factor VIII at the time from pooled blood donations.

Factor VIII was derived from the pooled blood of up to 10,000 donors. In the 80s, all of Ireland’s supply of Factor VIII came from the US. This was before there was a reliable HIV serology test, plus the common US policy of paying donors for their blood meant that there was a high rate of IV drug users among it regular donors. As a result, every haemophiliac in Ireland born before 1983 or ’84 had HIV, in an era when there were no effective antivirals and the average survival time from infection was only 9-11 years.

I got to know that boy because I stayed in the hospital too, in a nearly-disused nursing quarters, and we were the only people stuck late at night on the premises who weren’t working and he was pretty desperate for someone to talk to. He had one blown-out iris from a previous cerebral haemorrhage and knees that looked like rockmelons due to repeated intra-articular bleeds. He probably wasn’t going to die of his haemophilia, but his HIV infection. Even today, HIV is the most common cause of death in people with haemophilia.

When I hear politicians or priests talk about HIV being the price paid by sinners, I think of that boy, who probably died in his early 20s after a life spent mostly in hospital, and thousands of others around the world, and I wonder how anyone can have such monstrous moral blinkers.

When I hear politicians or priests talk about HIV being the price paid by sinners, I think of that boy, who probably died in his early 20s after a life spent mostly in hospital, and thousands of others around the world, and I wonder how anyone can have such monstrous moral blinkers.

Because if you did think about such things, then you might have to accept that you can’t explain reality using a god-based theory. And we know where that takes you.

Thank you for the comment, which opened my eyes to more of the harm done by the not-screened blood banks. I received large transfusions with my first childbirth. I got a registered letter years later warning me to be tested. I wasn’t HIV positive. If I had proved HIV positive, that means I’m secretly a man who went to Africa, I suppose, reading the republican stories, anyhow. I could not have been a married woman in Canada trying to give birth to a wonderful baby. Nope.

Tinyjesus, given that we cannot assure the sexual consent of a non-human animal the way we can assure that of a human, it’s rather a no-brainer that bestiality in all forms is wrong. However, I suspect for some reason that you know that.

Chris Lawson, I appreciate your anecdote, but it is important to stress that the boy was no more “innocent” than an HIV+ heroin addict with hundreds of sexual partners. Viruses are not moral judgments, and imperfect victims are still victims.

This makes me giggle, not because it’s funny, but because prudes claim sex with monkeys resulted in HIV and, according to animal rights activists I’ve spoken to, it was animal testing. Everyone’s got a theory to fit their agenda!

First : The guy who bleated the stupid lie about AIDS does not give a flying damn about the truth. Conservative Newspeak has taken over. Lies are not only acceptable but expected and seen as desirable. Have you been following any of the GOP candidates for elected office this cycle ? all of them, from low to high, are lying like a 5 year old with chocolate on his face who denies that he ate the last of the chocolate. Baldfaced, outright, shameless lies. they do not care if someone reveals their lie an hour later on cable news. It’s just fucking sickening.

Wow. She mentioned “screwing a monkey to get AIDS.” Pretty racist/xenophobic/republican. Obviously, has no cultural awareness of how common bushmeat is in Africa. Slaughtering a monkey, getting all the gore over a fresh cut (cuts also being more likely when you’re slaughterin’), seems much more likely a vector.

there’s only one way to fix the mess the dominant RWAs have gotten us into:

get them to change their message.

there simply is no other way.

passive authoritarians will listen if you work with them on issues you both care about, but that isn’t really going to happen for even a tiny fraction of authoritarians. in the end, what must be done is not to undo the now well established chain of manipulative rhetoric that first became obvious during Nixon’s “southern strategy”. no, that won’t happen. what needs to happen is that the same mechanism must be coopted to send out a different message. a bloody sane one this time.

but who will have enough power and influence to get these clowns to change their message?

nobody I can see.

and yes, it’s not just scary, it’s mind numbingly repetetive. The fall of all civilizations in history can probably be laid at the feet of authoritarian rule.

even looking at the 2oth century, you’ll readily see where authoritarians have been manipulated for personal and political gain with disastrous consequences.

I’m sure I don’t need to Godwin the thread, but if you read Richard Evans’ “The Coming of the Third Reich”, you’ll immediately see how the same techniques were used to manipulate fearful authoritarian personalities in Germany.

chrislawson,
While I do not have haemophilia I am part of the early 1980s tainted blood scandal here in Canada. I was born in 1982, a twin and quite premature. As I needed a transfusion I was also put at risk for HIV and other diseases. I remember my mother bringing me to the hospital for a blood test years later but did not realize why until she told me in the car while heading there. Not a pleasant memory.

Because if you did think about such things, then you might have to accept that you can’t explain reality using a god-based theory. And we know where that takes you

Yep. Women who have been raped can get pregnant. People who have never had gay sex can get AIDS. Life isn’t fair. Bad things happen to people who don’t “deserve” it. When you understand and accept that, it makes it hard to believe in an all-powerful loving God. That’s why they make up fantasy stories that women can’t get pregnant from rape and only gay people and IV drug users get AIDS.

Regarding lying, why should they stop? Bush and his cronies told outright lies about Iraq, and most of the press and most of the Democratic party failed to call them on it. Hell, mostly they acted as if the lies were true.

The GOP jettisoned reality based reasoning a long time ago with great success. I still don’t understand how it works. Sure, sure, confirmation bias and motivated reasoning are factors but how do lies so big, so stupid, so obvious, so easy to fact check, not jolt the intended audience into the realization that they are being played and lied to?

I also understand the GOP have their own propaganda arm and echo chamber but the audience also has google. How can conservative rubes never question their own beliefs or political dogma or that story about a pilot getting AIDS from having sex with a chimp?

I mean if someone tells me about some fact or study that swells me with schadenfreude at the discomfiture of my conservative opponents, I fact check the hell out of it lest I look like an utter fool when it turns out to be bogus information.

The GOP audience doesn’t seem to have that filter. At all. Why is that?

Anyone have an explanation? I would be very grateful for any recommendations to studies, books, etc that examine this (reading The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney at the moment)

Miss Daisy — First, my apologies, if I seemed to be calling bull shit on Shilts. That wasn’t my intent. As a journalist, he was a story teller, a creator of dramatic narratives…”fictions” by another name. His fictions may have been fact-based using the best information available to him at the time, but they are still fictions rather than say a scientific paper.

I was referring to the Patient 0 concept which Shilts used to good effect in his story. Campfield seems to be aware of the myth the concept engendered that a single person introduced AIDs to the US. It’s clear from Shilts’s own words in the book that he didn’t intend to promote that “single person” simplification. I doubt that the CDC study, from which Shilts began the Dugas story, meant that Dugas literally introduced AIDs to the US. It seems reasonable they simply meant he was the first person they identified to focus on as they were tracking down what was going on.

I understand that there are technical critiques of the CDC study, but I’m not qualified to assess those or their credibility, nor do I have access to them to cite them for you in a meaningful way.

And the Band Played On was an important work in the battle against the ignorance and bigotry that pervaded this country as the impact of the AIDs epidemic set in. Shilts was a courageous journalist to take on that task and tell such a compelling story.

Nobody seems to be talking about the real problem with the Senators assertion…Do you have any idea how difficult it is to fuck a monkey? Do you?

First off there is the language barrier problem. Then flowers or candy, and you don’t want to get that wrong because if you can find a monkey large enough such that a human penis would fit in it, it would easily beat you to death if you pissed it off.

Seriously, apes are huge and incredibly strong, does the Senator suppose that a little wine and Barry White is enough to get some sweet monkey ass? Ugh.

Esteleth: Sorry to get back to you so late regarding your multiple diseases question, but anyway, here I go: While it may be theoretically possible, Occam’s Razor suggests that a single pathogen is more likely. Unless, of course, something like HIV swept in first (not at the same time though, a delay of several months to a year would be required), then just about anything else came in and killed all of the immunocompromised people. However, the 1347 outbreak did not have any of the characteristics of this type of epidemic. However, the current TB epidemic in S-S Africa does.

Interesting. I wasn’t aware the hypothesis the Black Death wasn’t the plague had been rather throughly debunked. Or, for that matter, the SIV-to-HIV-via-bushmeat vector was now the leading candidate. Thanks!

I had a bunch of questions, at a lot of rage produced, in response to how blisteringly ignorant/stupid/gullible/hypocritical/contradictory/etc the followers of the modern right were.

I mean, I’d be sitting there holding my head multiple times a day asking myself, “how the FUCK could someone believe this??” and conundrums of that nature in response to just about every single thing I heard coming from the GOP.

I read The Authoritarians and it cleared up all of my questions pretty well.

Of course, each instance of clarity basically left me with, “Oh. Well, shit.”

I wish the book were like sticky-linked on every progressive blog/outlet there is.

Although most STDs come from screwing monkeys and gay men, heterosexual contact cannot spread STDs unless the man is wearing a condom. I wrote an article a couple months ago about the new TN requirement that school boards must create the curricula to be used in Alternative Science and sex education as a guide for teachers to use in their classrooms. This is part of the encouragement of ‘academic freedom’ in our state. Gov. Haslam doesn’t have us on par with Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, and Kentucky yet, but it’s not for a lack of trying.